Hating himself and Berghast and fate and God even as he thought it.
Now, from the middle of the road, they heard chanting, saw a procession of monks in yellow robes banging wood blocks, singing in their strange intonations. The rickshaw puller waited at the side for the monks to pass. Jacob frowned, looked away. No, it wasn’t just the old worry, the one he’d lived with all his life, as long as he could remember, that weighed on him. It was also the dreams.
At least that’s what he told himself they were, dreams. He hadn’t told Coulton yet. He didn’t know why not. Maybe it was the peculiar vividness of them, maybe it was just he didn’t think he could explain how real they felt, how undreamlike. They had to do with his dead brother, always, though his brother wasn’t in them, didn’t appear even as a memory. Instead there was always a figure, a lady, shrouded in darkness, dressed in an old-fashioned high-collared dress and a cloak and silk hat, talking to Jacob calmly, reasonably, in gentle tones, questioning him, speaking in riddles. Always it took place in whatever room he’d fallen asleep in, the ship’s cabin on their voyage, the creaking old Japanese inn three streets up from the harbor here in Tokyo, wherever, and always it was just as if he were waking normally up, the woman seated across the room, a visitor, bringing news from a world unimagined.
“You’re back,” Jacob would say, frightened, in the dream. “What are you?”
Are we not all we can imagine, Jacob? would come the reply, low, soft, soothing.
He’d try to sit up in his bedclothes, try to see the woman’s face. “What do you want? Why do you come to me?” His own voice sounding querulous and frightened to his ears.
And so would begin the strange call-and-response of the dream, like a catechism, the questions he seemed unable to ignore, the answers that came from him almost unwillingly, almost as if he couldn’t help it:
What is it you want, Jacob?
“To know those that I love are well. To bring those I have loved back to me.”
And are those that you loved not with you always?
“I fear, and I do not know.”
It is your brother, your twin brother that I mean.
“I did not save him. I did not save him.”
The woman’s soft voice, filling then with love: Death is not death, Jacob, and nothing is forever. I can reach him still, as can you. And if Berghast will not let you open the orsine, you must find your own way to me.…
And the dream would turn then, melt away, into some more ordinary dreaming, and when at last he awoke, unsettled, he’d be half-unsure he’d even dreamed it at all.
* * *
When they got back to the inn, he and Coulton removed their shoes and took the offered slippers and went quietly upstairs, the dark polished wood floors gleaming, their bodies drenched with sweat. There was a smell of blossoms in the air, cut flowers in a bowl in the hallway. After a few minutes they heard a muffled greeting, and the innkeeper’s wife appeared, a warm bottle of sake wrapped in a towel. She kneeled, opened the paper screen, entered, kneeled, and closed it behind her. Then she lit the lanterns, never once looking in their faces. There was such an unhurried grace in this country, Jacob marveled. So much beauty in the smallest of gestures.
When they were alone again, he said, just as if they hadn’t stopped speaking of it, just as if he was continuing his thought: “She has my talent, Frank. The dust.”
Coulton made a little movement of his head, said nothing. He was taking off his wet greatcoat.
“You saw what I saw.”
“Aye,” said Coulton reluctantly. “And I seen her sister too. That ain’t your talent, lad.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s the dust that’s done it.”
“You never done nothing like that.”
“I’ve never tried.”
“Aye.” Coulton grinned, pouring out a knuckle of sake. “Is that envy I see in you, lad?”
Jacob frowned, irritated. The man was teasing but, in truth, some part of him was fascinated by the possibility. He had never been able to find the limits of dustwork; who could say what it was capable of? But he said none of this out loud. Instead he said, “Easiest way to get her to come with us would be to promise to help the sister. That’s her weak point. Tell her we could cure her at Cairndale.”
“We can’t cure what that girl is.”
Jacob raised his face and saw Coulton watching him with hooded eyes and then he said it out loud, the thing they’d been avoiding naming: “Because she’s a litch. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? The little sister’s a litch.”